Symptoms The PANSS has been ‘the standard’ scale and is frequently adopted as the primary outcome measure in clinical studies for schizophrenia. It is reasonable to assume the more number of items (and the wider the potential score distribution) in a scale, the more likely one would be able to detect a difference but at the cost of time. In order to discern any difference, it might be better to rate as many scales as possible (e.g., all of the PANSS, BPRS, SAPS, and SANS), which nonetheless would be unrealistically time-consuming and in fact has been a case for none of the 150 studies investigated herein.   Redundancy within/across the scales is also of concern. For instance, factor analyses of the PANSS have identified several components19 and as such, rating these extracted factors instead of all 30 items might even be sufficient. In line with this view, efforts are ongoing to make simpler rating scales. For instance, The Clinical Global Impression-Schizophrenia scale: CGI-SCH20 is a